An IoT Scheduling and Interference Mitigation Scheme in TSCH Using Latin Rectangles

Time Slotted Channel Hopping (TSCH) is one of the most used MAC mechanisms introduced by the new amendment IEEE 802.15.4e. It combines both slotted access with channel hopping technique to allow multiple communications while exploiting the 16 available channels of 2.4GHz band. The channel hopping mechanism of 802.15.4e considers an interference-free environment and does not specify how to build and manage a schedule for communication purpose. In this paper, we propose a new distributed channel hopping scheme that exploits Latin rectangles to avoid interference and collisions. In essence, the scheduling of links is performed by Latin rectangles where rows are channel offsets and columns are slot offsets. Thus, the frequency of communication is derived using Latin rectangles. Consequently, interference and multi-path fading are mitigated with more reliability and robustness. The efficiency of the proposed scheme has been validated by extensive simulation.